
How to write about people one has never known, places one has never been to, things one has never personally experienced? These are the dilemmas facing a writer of fiction. Some years ago, I wrote a bit of poetry, and I was aided in the endeavour by a poet of some talent, with whom I would meet in a coffee shop about once a week to discuss my dubious efforts. At one of those meetings, I produced a poem that I had written depicting a man standing on the edge of the trapdoor of a gallows, about to have the noose slipped over his head by the hangman. In the poem I attempted to give expression to what was going through his mind in those final moments. I have never personally experienced anything close to what my subject was undergoing. What I had done, whether or not of any poetic worth, was attempt to convey what I imagined he would be thinking, what I would have been thinking should I have had I the misfortune to be in such a situation. The poet immediately rejected my poem, refusing even to discuss it, dismissing it with the advice that I have heard and read many times. “Write only about what you know.”
Was that good counsel? One can see where it is coming from. Many an adolescent has penned a love poem, but at fifteen what does one know about love? Such efforts can only be sentimental, derivative at best, even if they attempt to express true emotions. And yet, perhaps most literary works are about or include things that their authors could never have personally experienced.
How then is it done? How does a 30 or so year-old poet and playwright from a market town in the West Midlands of England get into the skin of a youth from a feuding noble family in Verona, Italy? How does an author of Irish decent, living in Majorca in the 1930s, persuade his readers that he is abreast of the scandals and scheming of the imperial court of first century AD Rome? Well, for one thing, by reading a lot. Shakespeare was perhaps influenced by classical writers and by Dante, and certainly read the story, Giulietta e Romeo by the Italian writer, Matteo Bandello (c. 1480–1562), perhaps through the English translation in poetic form by the English poet, Arthur Brooke, or the prose version by William Paynter. Robert Graves based his I Claudius and Claudius the God on the writings of the Roman historians, Suetonius and Tacitus.
Reading, yes… but that is not enough. To make a story seem real, one must do other types of research. This is particularly true of historical novels. Umberto Eco wrote that when he was writing the Island of the Day Before, he examined the layout of a ship and sketched the faces of the characters. He frequently visited the locations he was writing about in his novels, even going as fara as the South Seas (Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass and London, 2011, p.12-13).
But that too is not enough. And so, we come back to imagination, and to the advice of my poetry tutor, that unfortunate adage - “Write only about what you know”. I am not the first person to have put myself in the shoes of a condemned man. Without making any comparison, for my abandoned efforts were certainly bad, a great American writer, Ambrose Bierce, did the same exercise in what is one of the finest short stories ever written, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Bierce had served in the Civil War and no doubt had seen many things, perhaps even a hanging on a bridge. But he was writing about something he had not personally experienced, at least, not as the condemned man. And yet, his tale lacks nothing for the fact.
The reason why Bierce could write an effectively about of what was going through the mind of Peyton Farquhar (the man being hung in his tale) is because he was indeed writing about something he knew. He had not himself been hung, but he was able to put himself so entirely in the man's mindset as to know what that experience was like.
If, in my imagination, I can put myself into the shoes of a man carrying a rifle and running across a battlefield in Belgium in the dark of night (as I have attempted to do in my forthcoming novel, A Gentle Empire), and if I can do so with a passion, and to the degree that I palpably feel his fear, hear as he did, the roar of explosions and the rattle of machineguns, see as he saw, the brilliant flashes of light, and smell the lyddite; if I can do that, then it does not matter at all that I have never actually been in a similar situation. Like Bierce, I am writing about what I know.
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